Everything is better with Legos
December 16, 2016 3:28 PM   Subscribe

The Tampa Bay Times figured out a better way to explain a complicated transportation story...with Legos!
posted by agatha_magatha (17 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
Love me some legos in the real world, always, but it seems like overkill here. Couldn't the crux of the problem here been solved with a pretty simple napkin diagram of that "auxiliary lane" confusion?
posted by rokusan at 3:46 PM on December 16, 2016


Wow! That "not really a lane!" counting method from the Florida DOT is right up there with James Clapper's nebulous definition of NSA wiretap "collection" in the Misdirection Hall of Fame.
posted by indubitable at 3:51 PM on December 16, 2016 [5 favorites]


Using animation as they did forces the reader to slow down and pay attention to the important details of the story.
posted by ZeusHumms at 4:04 PM on December 16, 2016 [6 favorites]


Seriously, who was the FDOT official overseeing this project, Obi Wan Kenobi? "And what I told you about the toll lane was true... from a certain point of view."
posted by indubitable at 4:53 PM on December 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


*Lego

(the plural is Lego. Like sheep.)
posted by Paladin1138 at 6:27 PM on December 16, 2016 [7 favorites]


The Times did a great job with this and as a Tampa resident, fuck the TBX forever.
posted by penduluum at 6:37 PM on December 16, 2016 [2 favorites]


The Tampa Bay Times must have some great editors. Weren't they the ones that published that expose on "local" foods in restaurants? Keep killin' it, TBT.
posted by Diablevert at 7:07 PM on December 16, 2016 [3 favorites]


* legos.

It's funnier.
posted by rokusan at 7:54 PM on December 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


Honestly, that was worse than watching video. I got as far as "DOT counts lanes on bridges differently from people" and then I just had to quit. I have no sense of how much longer the story is going to go on for, I have no idea how many more clicks I'm going to have to make before I get to the end. (Ah scratch that. I just now noticed the skinny blue bar at the top. Gah, I'm only a third of the way through. )

It's too slow, too simplistic and too annoying. I understand the need to make things that are easy to understand for a wide variety of people, not all of whom may speak English as their mother tongue, but even given that, if this is what the future of journalism looks like, I'm very, very depressed.
posted by sardonyx at 7:57 PM on December 16, 2016


Man, the entire reason the Florida DOT nearly got away with pulling a fast one one on Tampa Bay residents to the tune of $400 million dollars was because transportation planning documents are so complicated and boring you can have a plan out there for over three years, discuss it in public many times, and even the people in charge of approving the thing as so susceptible to eye-glaze they'll fail to pick up on the screw-job they're being given.

The Tampa Bay Times explained the crux of the scandal in a way that 99% of the public could easily understand, using 20 pictures and a bit of animation, leavened with a bit of mild visual sarcasm to emphasize the sordid bureaucratic fuckery of it all. 20 pictures you could click/scroll through at your own pace, with a progress bar to show you how far along you were. Congratulations for being in the 1%.
posted by Diablevert at 8:37 PM on December 16, 2016 [8 favorites]


Thank you, Paladin1138, I didn't know Lego is the plural--sorry for any cringes caused!
posted by agatha_magatha at 9:09 PM on December 16, 2016 [1 favorite]


I dunno, that final "this is what you'll end up with, assuming you get your public transport working" picture doesn't seem to support a "central traffic planning bad, local politicians good" notion. Seems the problem is still the idea that transportation is about moving small boxes of metal around, not people.

Thank you, Paladin1138, I didn't know Lego is the plural--sorry for any cringes caused!

I don't think Lego A/S's style guide applies to MetaFilter, to be honest.
posted by effbot at 3:38 AM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


I love this. I agree it could have been potentially shorter but I genuinely think this was kick-ass work. I'm a former journalist and I would love to see more of this kind of thing. I'm gonna go back and explore some of the other stuff this paper has done. Thanks, OP!
posted by Bella Donna at 5:30 AM on December 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


(the plural is LEGO. Like sheep.)

No. LEGO is a brand name, and the items you are describing are LEGO bricks or sets.
posted by Fleebnork at 6:18 AM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


This is a terrific article, and the use of Lego is only the cherry on top. Congrats to the Tampa Bay Times and the writers who made it. I do wish it were possible to page backwards through the article though....
posted by JHarris at 9:37 AM on December 17, 2016


Yeah, if you wanna be technical the only correct plural is “LEGO® brand building bricks”, per lawyers, and you can only use the word LEGO (in caps) as an adjective, never a noun. So neither "lego" nor "legos" is acceptable to the company at all, in any way.

But who's gonna do that? So we're making up a colloquial plural either way, and the convention seems to vary from family-to-family, in my experience, much like colloquial terms for underwear, or what you call that room you all hang out in, the one with the television and sofa.

For me, it's legos when I'm being cute, but when I step on it in the middle of the night, it's officially GODDAMN LEGO! (all caps)

And since I have something like nine million of them distributed among many various "organization" (ha!) systems, I definitely step on them. A lot.
posted by rokusan at 10:38 AM on December 17, 2016


If you missed it, on the mobile site there's a blue bar at the top that shows how far along in the story you are.
posted by numaner at 5:42 AM on December 19, 2016


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